We're very excited to be at the Indie Megabooth at PAX West this year! If you are out there, please swing by and check us out! In honor of this, we put some new gameplay footage online to show off more tilesets, creatures, and powers we've been working on - enjoy!
Welcome to...Gone Viral!!
SO. MUCH. GREAT. STUFF!
Tons going on! Two of the things we really enjoy in Gone Viral are:
Physics! We want it to feel good pushing/smashing/knocking stuff around, whether it be baddies, boulders, or bouncy balls.
Slaughtering players! Especially with traps. And, of course, letting smart players kill enemies with traps then dropping in goodies to reward such stylish kills!
So we've been really doubling down with spinning rooms full of rolling spikeballs and tuning the physics behind knocking lit barrels into baddies. We've been making a ton of new content as well, including pushing, spinning, jumping, breaking stuff type rooms as occasional breathers from combat or, on deeper levels, with deadly combat in them as well!
Physics - just one of many ways to kill or be killed.
As part of all that, we've been improving how stylish moves work. You'll notice some new call-outs when you pull off cool moves, and new rewards being delivered as the audience gets excited!
Another great thing: We'll be at PAX West in Seattle on August 31st and September 1st, partnered with the Indie Megabooth!
Our main goal is to try to get hundreds of people playing the game, ask 'em tons of questions about what they like and don't, and take endless notes! It's always fun getting folks who aren't your literal friends and family in the game, and this will be the first time we've done that for Gone Viral - we're SO EXCITED!
And SO BUSY! Crunch time is on so we can have as much polish as possible in by then. So a special thanks to the aforementioned friends and family for helping us test in advance of PAX!
We're having a great time working on Gone Viral and can't for y'all to get a chance to play it yourselves. Thanks for reading!
Lots of progress in the last few weeks!
The creature train continues with Chris and Doug moving all sorts of new baddies in, and I've been neck-deep in the tutorial system. As those of you in game development know, it always takes a ton of tweaking and custom code to do a tutorial well.
And of course, we continue with new rooms and content. We thought we'd highlight a recent improvement to Multishot in particular.
Walloping enemies around is basically another way to do long range damage for us. The viewers love it when you rack up pinball hits and kills by smashing baddies into other baddies and so our mutations (passive improvements to your combat abilities) will often affect what happens when you wallop creatures as well as when you shoot projectiles.
With multishot we got to thinking - "Boy, it is cool when you start firing around a bunch of projectiles, but what impact should it have on melee?" After all, other mutations like Bomber affect both. Well, what if it let you smack creatures so hard it knocks their soul right out of em and into other creatures for more damage? The result:
Multishot working in melee as well as projectile combat
We're still cranking away and gearing up for the next round of testing, so thanks for keeping an eye on us!
We've been prototyping a slew of creatures recently, as demonstrated by things like our last update featuring the creepy / cute Wormbot. This week we are showing off our first vehicle enemy - the Minitank!
Our tanks developed into some pretty interesting gameplay during prototyping. Because they are hurling around high explosives willy-nilly, there's still a good way to defeat them if the run hasn't been kind enough to provide you with mutations of mass destruction.
Minitanks in prototype form!
If you can get the timing right, deflecting their rockets back into them, their friends, or really any hard surface they are unlucky enough to be parked next to can end the fight quickly. Of course, getting the timing wrong will ALSO end the fight quickly... as you become a fine red paste which the cleaning bots REALLY hate having to scrub.
Obviously, we didn't just work on awesome tanks - we've been working on our intro level too! This allows Gone Viral's master of ceremonies to make his first appearance in the game, and prepares us for our next rounds of testing. Now is a great time to send in a beta application if you haven't already... hint hint.
The Wormbot putting the "cute" in "acute bugphobia"
As y'all know, we've been pouring new creatures and artwork into the game, so we thought we'd show a little test of segmented creatures (temp art, work in process, etc.). For us these are especially funky because they need to work well with the physics of wallops and harpoons as those are a fundamental part of combat for us.
If you break 'em in two, they need to figure out how to survive in their new formation. Each segment is a little animated creature trying to keep its place in line relative to the segment ahead of them and when one dies, the segment behind it steps up, becomes a new head, and keeps on trucking.
With that in mind, check out our little physics/combat testing of the segmented wormbot - so cute! And so deadly! Well, not now. After we add in the attacks. We're thinking turret guns along the length. Muahaha!